CAMBRIDGE — Greg Webster realized the importance and value of honey bees about 15 years ago.

“We had a strawberry crop that had a lot of rough fruit on it,” he says. “We blamed it on poor pollination.

“So we brought bees in and a third of the way through the season that variety cleaned up. It was smooth again.”

Webster, along with his brothers Brian and Chris, owns and operates a 242-hectare farm in Cambridge, Kings County. It is located just off Highway 1, a short drive west of Coldbrook.

The farm grows about 10 hectares of strawberries, most of which he sells to Loblaw stores. It also grows two hectares of raspberries.

“I don’t think we would even consider growing either crop without bees now,” Webster says. “There hasn’t been a year since that we haven’t brought bees in.”

The farm now leases 20 hives each year and scatters them throughout its fields, which also grow large volumes of dry beans that are exported to the New England market.

“Bees are important to us, no question,” says Webster, who hires about 120 berry pickers during peak harvest season, including 28 Mexicans under Canada’s foreign worker program.

“I certainly share the concerns of some of the others about imported bees being brought in,” he says. “You don’t know how well monitored they are or how well they are being inspected.”

Webster said there is not doubt that the yield from a field “is almost directly proportional to the number of hives you have, up to a certain point.”

Since putting bees in his raspberry fields, “we’ve seen our production more than double,” Webster said. “Our yields are typically two to three times the yields of the average grower in the province.

“It’s not all bees. It’s a combination of things, including good management, but the bees are an important part of that equation.’’

Peter Burgess, a horticulture specialist with the farm consulting group Perennia, said bees are critical to many different crops in Nova Scotia, including apples, pears, peaches, plums, squash and pumpkins.

Some food crops can be pollinated by natural pollinators, like bees, wasps, flies and other insects. Even the wind can move a plant enough to cause pollination in some crops.

“That being said though, if we didn’t have managed pollinators, it would significantly reduce yields in the province and make a lot of operations not financially viable,” said Burgess. “We need a strong base of local beekeepers to be financially viable.”